Full range HD-SDI Video with Decklink card possible?

[Bob Zelin]

if you are using the SR5500 and want full 4:4:4 res with dual link, you should
only be using this BMD card –
Bob Zelin

DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4

[Janfroehlich]

We own a DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4

[Kaspar Kallas]

I captured live stream from F750 single link 4:2:2 and the values in that seem to be unclipped, at least testing in shake (what might be conversion anomaly)
Unfortunatly I have never captured RGB signal to comment – so if you have a good way to test the signal just let me know and I will do that

Also using 4:4:4 HD card

-Kaspar

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Jan –
I can’t wait to see what you wind up doing, because the generic “hi end” readers of this forum use products form Blackmagic, AJA, Aurora, Bluefish, AVID, Sony, etc. and most are not involved with the expensive equipment from Quantel and Discreet (like the Inferno, or eQ or other very expensive products). So if the Blackmagic 4:4:4 card just doesn’t cut it for you, I am very curious to find out what you wind up using to accomplish your job. For most of “us” the Decklink HD Pro 4:4:4 is “as good as it gets”.

Bob Zelin

[Sean Oneil]

I’m not so sure the Decklink has a built in limiter. It could be the codec that causes the clipping. You might try testing different codecs in the capture settings (try Apple and BMD codecs). Or try the Decklink Capture Utility as well as the NLE capture.

In Final Cut, I remember having a lot of trouble taking a 4:1:1 DV source and render it to Uncompressed without it legalizing it automatically (even if though the sequence was set to “Super-White”). So I suspect it’s the codec and not the card. Just a hunch though, I have no way of testing your situation myself so I could be completely wrong. Hopefully someone from BMD can chime in on this.

Sean

[Matt Dowling]

Romana,

I thought this was the Blackmagic forum? Not an advert space for RAVE HD!

And for what its worth, we dont touch any of the data. If you have full range levels coming in, they will be captured to disk. We verified this earlier this year when we were doing some testing at Panavision with their lead techs for a project we had been working on together.

It is only when anything is rendered, for example in FCP doing a dissolve between 2 clips, the levels in the dissolved part only get clipped. In fact we have the best of both worlds – With BMD FrameLink, you can turn all your DPX files into single QT files without duplicating the media – perfect for dirt removal or touchups and much easier to edit with that thousands of single DPX frames. It also works the other way around too, QT -> DPX

It works the same way on PC too, just in AVI instead of QT.

Regards,

Matt
Blackmagic Design

[Janfroehlich]

Hi Matt,

thank you very much for your hint. At the moment all our G5 systems ar running on OS 10.3 but we will upgrade to 10.4 in january. I’m really looking forward to see this working.

Jan Froehlich

[Michael Großmann]

Hallo,

In addition to Jan Froehlich’s experiences I found out that a 10 Bit gradient can NOT be saved and then reimported without loss of the 2 least significant bits when you are using effects like colorcorrection because the effects in the programms I tested are only using 8bit.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=124&postid=858088

This guess was verfied by Luke Maslen of BMD.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=124&postid=858164

Futhermore I ask a friend of mine to try getting the full 10 bits out of the file stream by programming a tool using the Decklink DirectShow SDK. As far as I understood, if he tries to get the samples before the AVI Decompressor, meaning the real codewords on the disk, the lowest code value he could get was 64 which affirms your concern.

best regards M.Gro